Traditional hockey sticks are made of wood and have a straight rectangular shaft (or handle) with a curved blade at one end of the shaft for handling and shooting a hockey puck. The hockey player holds the hockey stick at the other end of the shaft. The surface of the shaft is smooth and can slide within the player's hands. Typically, the player wears thick gloves, making the hockey stick more difficult to grasp. To improve the grip and keep the stick from sliding out of the player's hands, the player often wraps cloth tape around the end of the shaft to aid in grasping the stick. With tape the player also often builds a knob at the end of the shaft.
In addition to wooden hockey sticks, industry has produced hockey sticks of different material, such as plastic, which offers a safer alternative to the wooden stick and proves gentler to gymnasium floors (useful for floor hockey). Industry has also recently produced hockey sticks of aluminum and composite construction. Such hockey sticks are lighter in weight and have greater durability than the traditional wooden hockey sticks. Notwithstanding such improvements, these new-construction hockey sticks are similar to their traditional wooden counterparts in that they, too, have straight rectangular shafts and are therefore difficult to hold. Accordingly, the traditional method of using tape to produce a handgrip and a knob has carried over to the newer aluminum and composite-type sticks. As with the wooden sticks, however, these taped grips are awkward to use because the taped grip is predominately rectangular in shape, making it difficult and at times uncomfortable to hold with ungloved or gloved hands. Typically, taped grips are also unsightly and wear out quickly.
This discomfort and unsightliness associated with taped grips has led to the development of hockey stick grips that seek to improve stick handling comfort, style, and ease of use. Canadian Patent Application No. 2,270,681, published on Nov. 4, 2000, discloses an example of a resilient grip with a protrusion that rounds out one side to fit the palm of a player's hand. This grip has a handle recess (or sleeve) for receiving the end of the solid hockey stick handle (i.e., shaft) of wood or composite construction. Although the grip may improve the handling comfort of the player, methods for inserting and removing the hockey stick handle into and from the handle recess can be difficult. The '681 application suggests blowing compressed air into the handle recess in order to insert or remove the handle from the grip. The inconvenience of using a compressed air supply is likely to discourage removing the grip, for example, if the stick were to break. Another disadvantage is that after inserting the hockey stick handle into the sleeve, the sleeve is thicker and bulkier than the stick handle itself, making the sleeve uncomfortable to grasp because, for some users, the thickness is too large for their hand. Accordingly, there is a need for a comfortable grip that can be used with the new-construction hockey sticks without the aforementioned disadvantages.